Posts Tagged «cern»

The Higgs boson machine — CERN’s Large Hadron Collider — is barely five years old, and yet the international group of physicists is already planning its successor. Dubbed the Very Large Hadron Collider (points for creativity), the new collider will be around 60 miles long (four times longer than the LHC), and smash protons together with a collision energy of 100 teraelectronvolts (14 times the LHC’s current energy). While the LHC’s discovery of the Higgs boson was a watershed moment, its existence poses more questions than it answers — and those answers probably can’t be answered by the LHC.

Peter Higgs, the theoretical physicist after which the Higgs boson is named, has been awarded the 2013 Nobel Prize for Physics. Higgs shares the prize with Francois Englert, another theoretical physicist who reached similar conclusions about the Higgs boson around the same time, in the mid-’60s. Higgs and Englert will share a prize fund of around $1 million, while CERN — which discovered the Higgs boson last year — will receive nothing.

The new 31-kilometer (19.2 mi) International Linear Collider (ILC) is finally ready for construction, according to CERN and the Linear Collider Collaboration. The ILC will initially augment the LHC’s attempt to identify and characterize the Higgs boson, but in the future it could investigate new areas such as supersymmetry, dark matter and energy, and superstring theory, significantly advancing our knowledge of the universe.

20 years ago today, on April 30 1993, CERN contributed the technologies underpinning the World Wide Web to the royalty-free public domain. These simple technologies — the humble URL, HTTP, and HTML — were developed by Tim Berners-Lee at CERN in the early ’90s, but it wasn’t until they were open-sourced that the WWW actually became the web. If CERN had decided otherwise, much of what you consider to be the internet wouldn’t exist, including Facebook, Steam, and the humble website that you’re reading right now.

Following the discovery of what appears to be the Higgs boson, CERN’s Large Hadron Collider has been shut down so that it can be upgraded. If all goes the plan, the upgrades will almost double the power of the LHC, enabling the particle accelerator to carry out the second part of its primary mission: proving or disproving the existence of supersymmetry.

Scientists at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider have confirmed that the Higgs-like particle that they discovered on July 4 last year is a Higgs boson. Not the Higgs boson, but a Higgs boson — a subtle but important difference.

Russian search giant Yandex recently became an official CERN Openlab partner. As part of the deal, Yandex will share its MatrixNet search engine technology with researchers working on the LHCb experiment to assist them in their search for antimatter.

In one of the last updates before the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) shuts down until 2015, CERN has announced that its observation of the Higgs boson (or a particle that is Higgs-like) is now approaching 7 sigma certainty.

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